Thursday, 16 April 2015

Indeterminacy

Karen Gillan goes stateside

Some days it feels more like ‘possession’. Not the medieval
kind where the Devil has sent a succubus to torment me. I know that she is an
emanation of my mind, but still she takes me over, and my will-power, normally
so strong, is broken because her presence is welcome and exciting. Sometimes
she sticks around all day – recently that’s become her habit – and we spend a
pleasant but wholly unproductive day, she and I. It is literally like being
taken over by another body. In my workaday male body I’ve been suffering from
backache; when I ‘become’ her, my pains disappear in her younger body. How
uncanny is that? And yet she is not ineluctable. She can be banished by
obligation. On working days, and on the eve of working days, she makes herself
scarce. Thankfully.

It’s frustrating. As an intellectual, I bring my full
cerebral firepower to bear on this problem, yet still I can’t ‘crack’ it. I can’t
explain adequately what I feel or why I feel whatever it is I feel.

One reason for my incapacity may be that I’m trying to make
distinctions where, in reality, none exist: there are no hard edges, only fluid
contours, blurred lines, fuzzy between-states where one thing merges into
another, perhaps even chrysalis states where one thing metamorphoses into
something else, or pregnant states where one thing is born from another. It
might help to think of both gender and sexual orientation in these terms.

The rational mind cannot grasp a phenomenon whose nature is
indeterminacy. That said, I never cease to be amazed at the mind’s creativity,
its power to invent fantasies, to tell itself stories that make sense of
whatever weird shit it’s experiencing at the time. For much of 2014 I was
sustained by two fantasies: sometimes I was a hot British actress appearing on
an American talk show, like the lovely Karen in the photo above; sometimes an upmarket escort, a sort of Belle de
Jour character. By December I was disappointed that both had run out of steam. One
night before Christmas I fantasised I was my transitioning self, in bed with a
cis man who’d never been with a trans woman before. The brain was inventing stories
to make sense of shifting reality – the gender/sex relationship. I think the
idea of being a trans woman or of
undergoing transition had itself become eroticised. In my fantasy I was explaining
to the (inevitably faceless) man: “Have you been with a trans woman before? I’m
pre-op… Just so you know what to expect. Or what not to expect!” Fantasy, like myth, has power to bridge the
contradictions of existence, but by its nature it speaks untruths.

In what sense is she ‘me’? She is ‘me’ as I might be (or
would be?) if I’d been born female in 1990, rather than male in 19--. But
that’s a meaningless counterfactual. If I’d been born in 1990, then no way
could I have been born to the person I called mother. How can she share all or
part of my genetic material? One solution – I surprised myself by stumbling upon
this idea – is if she were my daughter.
Here is a plausible counterfactual –
that I married my on-off girlfriend in the late ‘80s and we had a child in 1990:
a girl, tall like her parents.

I internalise an ideal femme and I externalise my vestigial
male self as someone who looks at her and desires her. This was fine when my
vestigial male self was either a client paying for her sexual services or a
middle-aged talk show host flirting with her. But if I think of her as my ‘daughter’
while simultaneously thinking of myself as her ‘father’, then she cannot be
arousing to me. Place her opposite her ‘father’ and the mechanism falters,
bumping up against the incest taboo. To him she will always be his ‘little
girl’.

And yet the alternative is too hard to bear. That she’s not ‘me’
at all, or any part of me – she’s just a character I play, an escapist fantasy.
Thus is she reduced to a drag act, and a particularly ineffectual one at that,
since I’ve never dared present it in public.

One way out of this impasse is to say that the arousal I
sense when putting on her clothes or looking at my female body in the mirror is
not the ‘autogynephilic’ response of a male to an internalised female but the
bodying forth of the woman who was always within me, repressed, breaking
through the restraints of years and coming to realisation of the sensual
potential of her own body just as a cis woman might do when she masturbates.
But does it have to be 'either/or'? Why not 'both/and'? Here’s what I mean about indeterminacy. One of
these personae might merge into the other, or mutate into the other. Or perhaps
they both ‘exist’ simultaneously, but the mind struggles to contain two
contradictory concepts, so tries to privilege one over the other (or eliminate
one altogether).

Can I apply this principle of non-differentiation to my
other half? Instead of asking “who in the world is she?” perhaps I should stop
interrogating myself (and her). I know some unalterable facts about her: her
name, her age, something of her appearance and tastes – not much else. Can’t I
leave it at that? Just let her be. Accept her as a real presence. She doesn’t
have to be sustained by elaborate fantasies or analysed half to death with
psychobabble, for – whoever she is – she
isme.

1 comment:

What an interesting reading. I have aspects of self (not just two,) and the age-gap difference can be a thing... but I also have Dissociative Identity Disorder. I have different 'selves.' so to speak, but the timepoint in life in which they were created can dictate their ages now. So, rather than my female self being an impossible alternate-self based on birthdate differences (I am in my 30s,) I know that she can now be in her 20s because that era of my particular life was when she was created.